In familiar debates that accompany major events, as is the case with the Gaza War, some increasingly use “history” against those who do not share their opinion. The latter are presented as not standing “on the right side of history,” and, borrowing the phrase that Leon Trotsky used to refer to his Russian Menshevik opponents, they will inevitably end up “in the dustbin of history.”
The fact is that representing history and appropriating it combines maximally exhilarating imagery with minimal humility. Life’s experiences have repeatedly demonstrated how limited and contingent our capacity to predict and foresee the future is. Some among those who have pondered this question and opted for humility in making predictions attribute this limitation to a simple reason: even if we had intimate knowledge of precisely what had happened in the past, that information would be meager in comparison to the new potentialities that the future will bring. Neither nature, nor our moods, nor the possibility of error, nor any other factor allows us to unequivocally assert what is to come.
Against the view that assumes that the unforeseeable and surprising future is different from the known past, there have always been those who- claiming definitive knowledge about the course of history- assert that tomorrow will be a faithful sequel to yesterday. It is natural for them to see the course of history as repetitive and conclude that “return” is its governing principle. For Christian believers, the Messiah is inevitably returning, just as the Mahdi, according to those who believe in Shiite Islam, is returning. Thus, history moves between departure, the evil and demonic moment, and return, the moment overflowing with bliss and blessings. Ali Khamenei recently informed us that wars of the present and future are merely re-enactments of past wars, as “the battle between the Husseini front and the Yazidi front is ongoing.”
However, from a different perspective, with the establishment of the “science of history” in 19th-century Germany, an ascending spiral line replaced that repetitive one. According to Hegel, the idea, or spirit, dialectically transitions upwards from one stage to another, until it ultimately culminates in reason and freedom. As for the material manifestation of the idea, it is the state, which reaches its zenith with the Prussian state of his era. For his part, Karl Marx adopted this Hegelian dialectic but “stood it on its head;” that is, production, with its relations and forces, replaced the idea as the driver of history. During the Stalinist era, some Marxists made an art out of identifying the stages that history has undergone and would supposedly undergo, ending up with five that culminate in communism.
In our times, Francis Fukuyama was the latest to come out with a fatwa on the movement and direction of history, declaring, at the end of the Cold War, that it had ended with an overwhelming and final victory for liberal democracy.
With all their various intellectual foundations, and all the divergences between believers and atheists, as well as “right” and “left,” a happy ending is common to every school of determining the course of history. Salvation will ultimately play its anthem, and humanity will return to a time that resembles Eden before Adam and Eve were expelled from it and the relationship between the creator and his creations deteriorated. After all, is it conceivable that truth and justice will not triumph over falsehood and injustice, and that those who are hopeful and optimistic about finding happiness will not see that optimism validated?
Given the strength of the notion of “return,” some atheists borrowed the idea from believers, anticipating Marx’s “return” whenever a crisis emerges in the capitalist economy- mind you, those running that economy had never denied that it undergoes crises. As for those who are skeptical of this return, as they are of the returns that preceded it, nothing awaits them, per those knowledgeable about the course of history, but its “dustbin.”
Thus, this purported knowledge of history morphs into something like feudal ownership that allows for distributing its bounty among the people, with some granted comfortable beds in the salons of history while others are cast into its dustbin.
Modern European history has provided two stark testaments to the limitation of speculating about history along with several other less dramatic ones. The first was the outbreak of World War I as the Europeans had been enjoying the “Belle Epoque,” a time when it seemed that war had been relegated to museums. The second was the savage rise of Nazism in Germany- that is, in the country that Hegel had proclaimed as the cradle of the highest manifestation of the idea and spirit. Later, with the collapse of Soviet communism, which some Marxists believed to be the pinnacle of history, Russian humor summed up its position on categorical historical predictions in this joke: “Socialism is the longest road from capitalism to capitalism.”
None are more strongly drawn to definitive statements about the course of history than those with a deep fascination for fortune-telling, astrology, and soothsaying. They are also the most eager to consign us to a dustbin that has no more room because millions have been crammed into it. Unfortunately, the aversion to falling into the dustbins of reality does not receive the attention it deserves.